Saturday, June 28, 1980

Saturday June 28th

When I got up at about 1030 Mum was already up. Dad was still in bed so that meant we couldn’t make a sound lest we wake him. It’s really bad when Dad’s on nights – it’s just a case of pacing about waiting for him to get up.

I put the telly on quietly at about twelve to watch Wimbledon. The start was delayed about ten minutes due to rain, but eventually it stopped and I watched McEnroe beat Tom Okker in straight sets. Mum brought me my dinner in on a tray and when Dad got up at one they went out shopping and to pick Nanna P. up.

They came back at three – I was still slumped in front of the box – with N. P. and before I knew it the afternoon had gone. Before tea we (Dad and I) watched speedway and wrestling. We had pork chops for tea and after I had finished I watched Virginia Wade beat a woman whose name I cannot remember (it was like B. Danglesh or something similar). I then went upstairs.

In my bedroom I did my catalogue and played records (Jimi Hendrix, Supertramp . . .). Andrew rang about mid-evening. Mum answered the phone while I hovered around listening.

He hadn’t much news except that the proposed closure of B. A. A. has been delayed and he has a new flat on Corsham Highstreet.

I kept wandering up and down and when I went into the garden one time Dad told me that it had been decided, as from my birthday in ten days, to start giving me £4.00 a week (including $1.00 in the bank). I was quite pleased. He said that I had to be more tidy about the house and more thoughtful – he seemed almost apologetic when he told me this. My spending money has really gone up dramatically these last few months. For ages I just had a quid a week and I’m on three a week now. No doubt my spending will increase accordingly.

I did the pots about eight and then went back upstairs to play “Mike Oldfield – Boxed.” I played “Collaborations” (Sides 1 and 2) and the first side of Ommadawn which is so bloody brilliant it sent shivers down my spine.

I watched the last part of “Living Free” and a theatre awards programme until 1030 when I came up to bed.

I spent today getting keyed up about school – not keyed up in a nervous sense but keyed up with anticipation. I really am looking forward to this.

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ABOUT MERE PSEUD . . .

"It's about time you started thinking about the black dog on your back."

Mere Pseud emerges from the stain of a particular place at a particular time—England in the early 1980s, dreaming its way through the era of the Miner’s Strike, CND, Rock Against Racism, of Thatcher, the Falkland’s War and mass unemployment, an era that marks a turning point for British society, the advent of what we might call neoliberalism.

This four year long autofiction project mixes diary entries, cultural observation, teen confessionals, an enduring love for UK postpunk band The Fall, image-meditations on memory, and spoken word fragments; it’s a reckoning with the passages of time and the spectral intermingling of futures and pasts, a slantways slide through places, spaces, and states of mind.

This is the moveable backdrop; part social history, part prolonged personal pratfall, the spectral trace of a world that's already curiously antique.

"The journal has such familiar episodes . . . being a certain age at a certain time in history, the political atmosphere, cultural touchstones, living situations . . . desires to both escape and belong ending in nihilistic abyss of fuckitall."

PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE, SUMMER 1983

The Mere Pseud . . . The unreliable eighteen-year old modernist narrator of this fable. Now a student at Watermouth University. Perhaps he'll run into Howard Kirk?Barry, Stu, Pete, Penny, Gareth, Shelley, Lindsey. University friends.

Rowan Morrison. Dark-eyed changeling who lived a few doors down from the Mere Pseud his first year at Wollstonecraft. A little older and a little weirder than all the rest. Her dark sun sends a chill through the second floor corridors of Wollstonecraft.

Helen Vaughan . . . (1864-1919). Enigmatic Yorkshire novelist, author of The Harp of the Sky (1920), and inspiration for British horror writer Arthur Machen's character of the same name in his story "The Great God Pan." Occasional object of the Mere Pseud's obsessive thoughts about death, time, and the passing of all things.

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